Monday, April 29, 2013

The Skaters Dance

Thoughts on what happens when we write .... and read.

THE SKATERS DANCE

by
Christian Gehman

Now. Maybe …

Please, can you imagine? … now … that
somewhere in a foreign country, not too far from here, where it is winter—out
in the country there, she lives—a skater?
She is beautiful; she looks like someone you have loved, and someone you
still love today, and someone you will love tomorrow.

She has those beautiful kind
hazel eyes, or bright blue eyes, or the warm brown eyes you will always
love. She may have green eyes,
even. Not for jealousy.

Imagine you can see snow
everywhere: a wintry landscape, Currier and Ives, perhaps a barn and cows, a
farm yard with some chickens, a log cabin with a porch. Around this peaceful snowy paradise are
snow-covered fir trees: and a wisp of smoke curls up from the cabin's field
stone chimney.

Just outside the kitchen window
live some chickens in their chicken house, and they are happy making eggs. In the barn live cows; the horses there are
stamping, munching hay, blowing steam out their noses in the cold frosty air.

On this day, our skater gets up
early, rising from her sleigh-bed in the rafters of the cabin, fluffing back
her goose down comforter—she gets up
early knowing she’ll go skating. Our skater dresses all in green: green
skirt, green tights, green leotard, and her form-fitting green skater’s jacket
has been trimmed with pure white ermine at the collar. Each green is slightly different.

Downstairs in the kitchen she
prepares a cup of creamy, warm hot chocolate: a dark liquid not too sweet but
creamy and well-frothed with bubbles.
She drinks it sip by sip gazing into the fire.

Then, dangling her figure skates
across one shoulder, our Skater sashays out the door. She walks through the
wintry landscape with its dark green, snow-covered trees: she sees her breath puff
in the frosty air as she walks down to the pond, a light snow crunching under
her warm fleece-lined boots.

It has been a cold winter, so the
old quarry pond is blessed with black ice three feet thick. The water in one corner, as our skater
knows, is deep enough to swallow you forever if the ice lets go.

She sits down at the end of the
short wooden dock to lace her skates up tight.

The pond’s black ice is smooth,
unmarked.

Her green skating costume trimmed
with ermine; and the way she looks around so kindly, with her eyes: these are things you will remember. Also, how she moves: her swoops and twirls and arabesques, her
lutzes, axels, doubles, triples, triple-doubles: how she spins and bends and
pirouettes. A champion of skating, now
she's practicing for her performance at the next Olympics.

Each move our skater makes cuts a
distinct mark on the ice. Her skate
blades cut these marks quite clearly on the smooth black ice. Her skates make a slight scraping, grinding,
slicing noise, but she is not too much aware of that noise, while she
skates. It is part of her skating
process. Sometimes she might sing or
hum or maybe even talk to herself—from pure delight and from enjoying what she’s doing: how
she’s skating.

She can glide, she can soar, she
can swoop; she can twirl, she can leap, she can spin and she can make your
heart stop, fascinated, with the loveliness of all her movements, skating:
until finally you know she loves to do the skater's dance for you.

And in her heart someone
is always watching.

At long last, after skating to a great sufficiency,
she goes back to her cabin, stopping at the barn to say hello to the big bay
horses and the Guernsey cows, making sure they have plenty of water. Back home at last, she makes another cup of
that sweet dark hot chocolate whose foamy breaking bubbles glisten creamy in
the cup.

Before long, while she’s still
drinking chocolate, another skater comes over the hill from a neighboring
farm. He looks down at all the marks she left on the ice. A young man, and he hopes to be a champion
one day. He sits down on the dock and
pulls his skates on, lacing them up tight, then glides out on the smooth black
ice.

This second skater, puzzling out
the marks that she has left, finds
that by skating over them, so that his own skates run where hers ran: he
finds that the figure of the skater's dance repeats itself in his own
movements: all her swoops and twirls and arabesques, the lutzes, axels,
doubles, triples, triple-doubles: all her swirls and bends and pirouettes are reproduced
now in his movements. And
sometimes the next skater adds in his own movements or re-skates again some of her figures that he’s already skated
over—just to learn them better, maybe—or because he likes to skate them?

Skating in her marks, he
feels the same emotions and sometimes almost thinks to see reflections of the
kindly look that he has seen so often—in
her eyes.

But of course, he makes a few mistakes, or maybe
puts in—now and then—his own material, improves a little here and there on her
dance; he grows bored or fascinated by the dance she did and by his own
reinterpretations of that dance. His
mind moves with his body as her mind moved with her body when she
skated.

Sometimes his mind goes off
completely on a wander of its own, some wild new tangent—and calls up a new, completely different series of
movements, which we might call “the dream of skating”—but before long it returns to what he has been doing, skating
over her marks, and he becomes aware of the wander only when he
"wakes" to find himself still tracing out her marks on the
ice: that mad, mad whirl of marks whose meaning can be puzzled out only by
someone whose ability to skate has been not just well-learned but also
practiced.

This puts him, somewhat, in the same position as
you, dear reader, looking at this text and reading, falling, maybe now and
then, into your own sweet dream of reading.

Did you like skating into this fable?

Is it time for some hot chocolate? … for the foamy
breaking bubbles glistening at the cup’s edge: maybe chocolat with
whipped cream on top?

At long last, after skating to
his heart's content, the second skater finally takes off his skates and puts
his boots back on. He walks home past
the skater's cabin, stopping in her barn to say hello to all her horses and her
cows (because they’re old, old friends); then he knocks on her front door, she
opens her door smiling at him just because he looks so handsome in his tight
black skater’s outfit! -- and then he drinks a nice cup of the hottest creamy
chocolate with her, looking up to her kindly hazel green eyes.

Will they both hope that possibly
"Tomorrow we can skate again" …?

Perhaps together?

Smiling.

Now perhaps, dear reader, what I have been getting
at is that the important thing about reading the great books is the “dance of
the intellect among words” – producing which dance, after all, is the main
purpose of “education.”

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About Me

Prize winning novelist and chef. My food column appeared in six daily newspapers long before the food revolution began. I have written several novels even less well known than beloved Gravely, which Scribner's published in 1984 and blessed with their Maxwell Perkins Prize. These manuscripts -- Why I Love Brunettes and Daughters -- are available to any interested reader. I started writing as a sports reporter on the Kingston Daily Freeman. I have a Master's Degree in Fiction Writing (telling lies?) ... but no B.A., though I do speak French and Spanish and have studied enough Greek to parse the Koinae. Long before I attended the famous Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, my food column Christian's Cookery used to appear in eight daily newspapers, including The Charlottesville Daily Progress and The Omaha World herald. After attending high school near Woodstock, New York, where they never had the Woodstock Music Festival, I owned a very successful money-making restaurant in Charlottesville. While working as a country mailman, I learned to jump small coops bareback. I have piloted hot air balloons. I love my children more than stars. Two of my best friends, both named David, died some years ago. I love scribbling, cooking and Morgon. I still believe B. Traven was Jack London. My favorite movie is Mr. Hulot's Holiday. And the restaurant opening scene from Playtime. Do you know me?